Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Felix Bloch, Niels Bohr, Max Born, Muarry Gell-Mann, Lev Landau, Heinrich Hertz, Julian Schwinger, Albert A. Michelson, John von Neumann, Wolfgang Pauli, Steven Weinberg, Eugene Wigner, Edward Witten, Sheldon Glasgow, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leonard Susskind, Lee Smolin, Karl Schwarzschild, Tullio Levi-Civita are all Jewish.
2007-09-28 08:57:43 · 10 answers · asked by Anonymous in Science & Mathematics ➔ Physics
and Alan Guth, Michael Green
2007-09-28 09:00:51 · update #1
More than half are not german
2007-09-28 09:01:21 · update #2
Issac Newton and Stephen Hawking are not on that list (I do not know for sure if they are not Jewish though).
A lot of those who are on your list were involved in the Manhatten project. A lot of the best Jewish scientists from Europe immigrated to America to escape Nazi persecution. They became involved in the Manhatten project to prevent Germany from developing the bomb and became well known.
Not a complete answer but it is a start.
2007-09-28 09:12:55 · answer #1 · answered by John V 5 · 4⤊ 0⤋
Hawking, Rutherford, Fermi, Kelvin, Newton, Faraday, Snell, Pascal, Galileo, Huygens, Hooke, Franklin, Euler, Bernoulli, Cavendish, Lagrange, Coulomb, Fourier, Young, Biot, Ampere, Avagodro, Gauss, Tesla, Ohm, Carnot, Henry, Doppler, Balmer, Swan, Maxwell, Mach, Gibbs, Reynolds, Boltzman, Hall, van der Waals, Rayleigh, Becquerel, Michelson, Lorentz, Curie's (both of them), Wilson, Willikon, Perrin, Marconi, Hess, Debeye, Raman, Bragg, Dirac, Powell, Walton, Anderson, Bloch, Segre, Yukawa, Ning Yang, Lee. I'm getting tired of writing. While I may be mistaken on one or two of them, these people are not Jewish. They're also among the best physicists today and of the past. Don't make false assumptions based on incomplete evidence.
2007-09-28 16:23:56 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 0⤋
Well on the historical side, the Jews have been an extremely literate society since the diaspora (1st century AD). As their people became scattered all over the Mediterranean world, they kept their cultural identity by requiring that all men study the Torah - by reading it.
So in addition to having a high literacy rate, most Jewish men were multi-lingual to an extent - they read ancient Hebrew, spoke the local language and also spoke their own version of the local language, for example Yiddish in Germany.
Add to that the effects of persecution for centuries, such as not being allowed to own land or join a guild, so farming and trades are out. Moneylending, which Christians were forbidden to do for profit, was one of the few options left. It also required mathematical abilty, literacy and fluency in more than one language.
Fast forward hundreds of years to discover that one of the most persecuted groups of people in history is still scattered all over the world, but has still maintained some sort of identity as Jews. The strengths that have gotten them this far have been encouraged in every generation, so that "smartness" is considered a value in itself.
I read that Feynmann's father used to create different patterns with tiles for him to stare at when he was still in his high chair. So, I don't think there is some kind of genetic reason that Jews are smart. I think that intelligence is a value passed from Jewish parents to Jewish children from a very young age.
And that's my two cents.
2007-09-28 16:31:37 · answer #3 · answered by Maybe Next Year 3 · 1⤊ 1⤋
Why are the best lovers Italian?
Why are the best cooks French?
Why can white man not jump?
Because we all like to express our hidden racial or nationalist feelings in these empty and dangerous figures of speech.
The APS (American Physical Society) has, I believe, some 100,000 members. You might want to look them up and the correct your impressions about racial distribution in physics. It is all over the place. It happens to be all over the place in the past, too, you just haven't included the non-Jews into your skewed statistic.
2007-09-28 16:17:37 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 4⤊ 0⤋
jewish families have always emphasized education, and for much of their history in europe, jewish people were not allowed to join unions or guilds, so they had to go into other businesses like academia.
also, there is a great tradition in judaism that says that studying the physical world is like studying the work of g-d, so scientific inquiry was always encouraged, whereas in some branches of christianity, science is seen to be opposed to faith, and therefore is undervalued.
2007-09-28 16:58:30 · answer #5 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
3 of the top 5 physicists (which you misspelled) were not Jewish. Heisenberg, Maxwell and the most important one of all Newton.
It is true that many are Jewish and I attribute this to the strong love of learning held by this community.
2007-09-28 16:13:53 · answer #6 · answered by Billy Dee 7 · 1⤊ 1⤋
They also seem to be all German.
Why didn't you ask why the best physicists were German?
2007-09-28 16:00:44 · answer #7 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 2⤋
The world of physics is a noble endeavor. Why not?
2007-09-28 16:03:13 · answer #8 · answered by goring 6 · 0⤊ 3⤋
Religion has nothing to do with it. They all just happen to to be very, very smart people.
2007-09-28 16:01:04 · answer #9 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 1⤋
Hi. I don't know. Oy!
2007-09-28 16:00:55 · answer #10 · answered by Cirric 7 · 1⤊ 3⤋